Biography Update

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

READ BELOW!

It’s been a busy month. Updating the entire Pepper Adams Interviews section of

pepperadams.com took a ton of time, mostly because I needed to listen to all of

them again in their entirety. I wanted to be sure that I didn’t overlook any important

facts that Pepper mentioned which might be a valuable addition to my Adams

biography. Also, it was necessary to add some mouse-over text for the user and fix

some previous errors. As of now, all fourteen interviews have been posted. All that

remains is seeing if we can improve the digital skips in the John Reid interview.

For several weeks, on and off, I’ve continued to wrestle with the opening section of

Chapter One of the Pepper bio. I just wasn’t entirely happy with it. I think now I’ve got it

where I want it.

I’m happy too with the rest of Chapter 1, and 4, and I’ve been editing Chapters 2 and 3.

Moreover, I’ve rewritten the Prologue and that’s done.

I did finish going through a stack of notes and quotations from various interviews that I

did with Johnny Griffin, Bill Watrous, Bill Perkins and others. Now that the pile of info is

sorted out, I’ve turned to my 46 microcassettes (as much as 92 hours of interview) that I

need to hear before I feel comfortable that I’ve gotten everything that I need from them.

Once finished, probably by early September, I can edit Chapter 5 and move on to Chapter

6, my final chapter.

Regarding Chapter 6, I already have 60 pages of notes and an outline. I’m hoping I can

breeze through it, then make some valuable concluding comments.

As for the publishing the first half of the bio soon, I think that this will be pushed ahead to

early next year. I just have too much work to do before I get to that point. Before it’s done,

I’ll be establishing a mailing list, very long overdue, at pepperdams.com

Below are some recent interview excerpts I hope you enjoy that I’ve added to my notes:

Pepper Adams to Ben Sidran:

“If you play everything legato, and don’t use the tongue -- and don’t outline where the
note is going to hit -- everything tends to run together because it is lower pitched. It has
no rhythmic impact, or impulse, behind it. I’ve tried to use a legato tongue so that there
is differentiation between the notes. I’ve tried to do a lot with articulation because that
has a lot to do with what the time feeling is going to be. And, if you fail to articulate on
baritone, or particularly on lower pitched instrument, it is going to be one constant rumble
after a while.”

Bill Watrous to Gary Carner:

“Every time he played, it was an adventure,” said Bill Watrous. “His ideas, and his
conception of the stuff that he was trying to play, was totally original. I would say, more
so than anybody else [who] ever played that instrument.”

“Pepper had an angularity about his playing, like a jagged sort of approach, that was very
much like the way Sonny Rollins approaches the instrument. Sonny goes at the instrument
from all angles -- from the left, from the right, and under, and goes that way. Pepper,
basically, did the same thing. Pepper had incredible technique. Pepper didn’t just run the
changes. Pepper played all over the changes. I think they sort of approached their music
from a similar direction.”

“The sense of humor was amazing! Pepper would play: I found myself laughing to myself a
lot when Pepper would play some of the things he would play.”

Bill Perkins to Gary Carner:

“He’s one of the true giants of jazz. He stood out in that rare group of jazz soloists, the great giants
of all time, people like Bird and Prez. And John Coltrane has become that. I think that Pepper was
that on his instrument. And Diz. They’re in an area where very few have done the creative work that
they’ve done.”

Johnny Griffin to Gary Carner:

“He was never a pushy person. Maybe that’s what kept him from being more of a giant, as
far as the public is concerned, because he was never aggressive.”

Ron Kolber to Gary Carner:

“He would send me a tune, an old tune,” said Ron Kolber. “Every time we’d see each other, he’d
say, ‘You know this one?’ We used to try to stump each other with old tunes. One his favorite tunes
was a tune by the name of ‘Says My Heart.’ It’s an old tune. Always digging for old tunes; that was a
little hobby with him. He said that some of the early tunes were really great. . . . He had great interest
in the old-timers. Any of the old-timers. He would listen to all of the old records. He said, ‘That’s where
we’re from.’ He said, ‘If we listen to that, we’re gonna get to where we are, and maybe beyond, but
you can’t start in the middle and go. You gotta go all the way back.’”

Finally, here’s three clips of tunes that Anders Svanoe performed at his recent concert dedicated to
Pepper, and a video of Pepper conducting an after-concert interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybB-Rpnzx8A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRtmIVKJ9EI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXdFEEnkq5M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ovuEbDv8YQ

Chapter Five of the Bio

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

My apologies for missing the February post. My work schedule has shifted since
December. I now work all day Friday through Sunday. I’m just too beat to write
over the weekend. Mondays will now be the new posting day.

It’s been a very productive few months of 2019. Chapter Five of the biography is
mostly done. Currently, I’m working through my last fifty or so interviews,
tweaking things here and there. The interviews will take me through the summer.
Then I can wrap up the chapter and move on to the Listener’s Guide, 1963-1977.
Hearing all of that music, and writing about Pepper’s best solos from the period,
will take the rest of the year to complete. Once done, I can move on to the final
chapter, covering the period 1956-1963. I’m expecting the finish line to be
Christmas, 2020.

Here’s an amusing excerpt from Chapter Five, spoken by the writer Albert
Goldman:

“At that time,” said Goldman, “I always had a 4th of July party.”

I always had a lot of jazz musicians to it, because those guys don’t go out of town on that day and they don’t
know what to do with themselves. I’d always have Zoot, and I’d always have Elvin, and I’d always have them
at my apartment. This year, I did it bigger. I took the whole restaurant. A lot of weird people came: Buddy
Rich. . . . I had this friend at the time who was a real hardcore drug criminal, a wonderful character. He said,
“Al, let me cater the drugs for the party.” I said, “O.K., man, go ahead.” So, they had all these drugs out on
bronze platters that they were passing around, the [chargers] that they put down before they serve you the
meal, then they remove it and put down the plates. They filled all those up with drugs. Some of the Indian
waiters are going around, saying, “Hashish! Hashish!” This is the atmosphere of the party in the afternoon.

The guy who ran the restaurant was a weird cat named Samsher Wadud, who claimed to be a nephew of the
Prime Minister of Bangladesh. He went over to the U.N. that day to demonstrate. He said, “I’m going to leave
you in charge of the restaurant, O.K?” I said, “Fine, don’t worry about it. These are all my people. We have no
problem. If anybody else comes, I’ll just take care of them.” In the course of the afternoon, I think only one
couple turned up who weren’t from the party. It was some big, blonde, buxom English lady and her spinster
daughter, or niece, or something, and they didn’t know what was going on. They just walked into this
restaurant for an Indian meal and people are passing these plates of drugs. I remember they reached into a pile
of marijuana and just put it in their mouths, like it was some seeds they were going to eat, like alfalfa. When
they got through, they asked for the bill. I said, “Oh, no, it’s all on the house. You’re here for the first time,
aren’t you?” And they said, “Oh, you’re so gracious! We’ll have to tell everyone in England when we get
home. . . .”

All my crazy friends were there. Drug dealers. Of course Bob [Gold] was there with his old lady at the
time, and Zoot and Elvin. I remember Zoot passed out completely. He never even got to play. Pepper played
this great musical afternoon — we were going to make an album of it, actually. What it was was mostly a lot
of Duke Ellington stuff in a very icy, cool mode, like the frost on a bucket of champagne. It was so beautiful!
I would love to hear him in that mode. I told him, “Play all that cool Ellington stuff.” It’s an afternoon party.
We’re up in the penthouse there, all high as a kite. I said, “Let’s really do it. Do all those Billy Strayhorn
tunes.” It was a very cool, frosted-champagne afternoon.

That afternoon always stuck out in my mind as the kind of thing that Pepper should have been doing a lot
because he loved it. He was just functioning as a musician. He wasn’t an assertive guy. He didn’t want to be a
star. He just wanted to do his own thing, but he wanted to do it under the right auspices. He didn’t want to be
in some shithouse with a bunch of nitwits. And this was a very cool audience. I remember there was a very
hip Brazilian guy who came up with his girlfriend, who was just in from Rio. (I know a lot of people, and the
kind of audience he loved, who could really dig him.) Jack Kroll of Newsweek was there. I remember Jack just
sat there, with his drink, in front of Pepper for about an hour and dug him.

I thought to myself, “This is the kind of gig that guys should always be playing.” But nobody knew
he existed! That’s the tragedy of it. This great talent. I’m telling you, after years and years in the
jazz scene, I’ve heard all the famous, so-called “underground” stars. There’s a lot of these people.
One of them is Zoot’s brother, who played trombone for years in bands in Vegas. He’s a very good
trombone player. There are a number of people; they dropped out of the business because they had
to make a living, they had to put their kids through college, they lived in some weird town, or
something. But over the course of years, you get to hear them all, and, believe me, none of them
were in a league with Pepper. None of them. There wasn’t anybody. Pepper “walked away” from
all these people. He was the hippest, he was the coolest, he was the greatest technician, he was the
most sophisticated, the one who integrated more references.

Because my co-author, John Vana, is teaching a graduate level course this Spring at Western Illinois
about “the big three” (Bird, Trane, Pepper), it seemed like a great time to visit with his students, and
organize a few college lectures in the Midwest around the trip. Accordingly, I’ll be lecturing this coming
April at the University of Wisconsin- Lacrosse, Winona State University, Beloit College, and the
University of Northern Iowa. I’m also taking some vacation time in the Twin Cities.

The baritone saxophonist Anders Svanoe invited me to speak to his students at Beloit. Ultimately, we
decided to put on a concert of Pepper’s music in Madison, Wisconsin. His quartet will perform, and I’ll
read a few passages from Joy Road. It takes place on Wednesday, April 17 at 8pm. Here’s the
announcement:

https://artlitlab.org/events/the-life-and-music-of-pepper-adams-reading-and-concert

Reflectory

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.




I'm just back from a vacation in Canada. Sorry for the delay in uploading this post. On my way home I visited with trumpeter Denny Christianson, who was the only musician to ever record Pepper Adams in a big band setting with Adams as the featured soloist. That recording, Suite: Mingus, and its follow-up date, More Pepper (with a few additional cuts from the Montreal session), were released posthumously. Adams, very weak from cancer in February, 1986, made it through the recording but it was a Herculean struggle for him to get through the date. Denny told me that, for the first few takes, the rhythm section was pulling back the time to stay with Pepper because he was back-phrasing. Denny had to instruct them to keep the time in place so Pepper could express himself as he wished.

Christianson has run the esteemed Humber College jazz program in Toronto for eighteen years, building it to its current state as one of the world's finest. At age 75, he has just retired. He intends to begin writing his memoirs once all his things in his office are organized and packed.

It was a joy to reminisce about Pepper with him and his wife, Rose, and to share parts of the first half of my Pepper book with them. Later, saxophonists Pat LaBarbera, Kirk MacDonald, and Shirantha Beddage, all on the Humber faculty, came by for a barbecue. What a great experience! From Denny, Rose and Kirk I was able to record some more valuable interview material that will be helpful in the second half of the biography.

While in Canada, before returning to Toronto, I hung out with my pepperadams.com webmaster. We made considerable progress with the Dedications page, gathering performances. That page, and Big Band Arrangements, are currently being updated. New Chronology files have already been posted at the site. In some cases, these are the first updates in over a year, with much new information, including the newly researched inception of the Thad Jones-Pepper Adams Quintet.

My co-author on the Pepper biography, John Vana, and I have adopted a new working title for the Pepper Adams book. We're running with Reflectory: The Life and Music of Pepper Adams. Do you like it? John felt that the title underscored Pepper's contemplative, intellectual side. I felt that it had an air of poetry to it. The subtitle needs to be there to reflect the bifurcated nature --  Pepper's life and the musical analysis -- of our twin approach. As with my first Adams book, Pepper Adams' Joy Road, we'll use on the cover what I feel is Pepper's most iconic photograph.

I've added a surprise, very special guest to write an Afterword to the book. Still another contributor is in the works. The idea is to have at least one world renowned jazz scholar/musician validate some of John Vana's observations, to add weight and emphasis to them. For one thing, putting Adams in a class with Bird and Trane will surprise some, if not many. I feel it's important that Vana's conclusions not be perceived as the ranting of a biased fan. Having an Afterword will silence the cynics, and startle those who have been asleep about Adams.

To that aim, Vana will be teaching a graduate course at Western Illinois University in the Spring, 2019: "The Big Three: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Pepper Adams." I expect he'll make all sorts of discoveries that will make its way to our book.

I've been listening recently to my interviews with Tommy and Diana Flanagan. I'm nearly finished with them. The great value of this documentation is that it helps me understand the last few years of Pepper's life, especially how he dealt with his final illness.

I did listen to my interview with Bob Wilber that I conducted in 1988, between sets at the Sticky Wicket Pub in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, where he appeared as a soloist with a rhythm section. Wow, was he tremendous that Sunday afternoon!

Here are some Wilber interview excerpts about Pepper:

"He saw the possibility of taking the big sound from the baritone, from Carney, and applying it to bebop jazz -- which was a difficult thing to do because when you have a really big sound it tends to be sluggish. It tends to slow you down."

"One of the tensions that he achieved in his playing was this feeling of being slightly behind, as though he was falling behind. It added tension to his playing."

"Yeah, legato tongue, where Carney tended to be more legato without any tonguing. He had great harmonic sophistication. He explored all the possibilities of using the diminished scale, and all kinds of things. Very sophisticated harmonically."

"A gentle guy. He had that soft way of speaking."

In the next few weeks I'll begin cataloging part of Adams' collection before I drive up to New Jersey to donate it to the William Paterson University Archive. I'll be including a list of Pepper's 78s and LPs, as well as his personal 8-Track collection, as appendices in the biography. How appropriate to have the Pepper and Thad Jones collections together at the same institution!

Last month I promised to share Eddie Locke interview excerpts. That will have to wait until my next installment. I may also include some of Doc Holladay's interview excerpts next month too.
Happy Summer to all!

More Pepper Biography News

It's been a dense month of listening to the many interviews that I conducted with a bunch of Detroiters, such as Hugh Lawson, Bess Bonnier, Phil Levine, Curtis Fuller and others. I still have a number of them to hear. All of them relate to Pepper's early days in Detroit.
The value of listening to them is to find little gems of information that I can still add to the book, or to make factual corrections to the existing text. When I add new text, of course, I have to take my time writing a new paragraph here and there, and then go through a series of rewrites. Here's a few examples of some new text. (I'm still researching what instrument Vigiletti played):


Adams’ friends mostly referred to him as “Pepper.” Some affectionately shortened his nickname to “Pep.” Others, such as Barry Harris, called him “Mr. Peepers,” because of his similarity, in appearance and affect, to the mild-mannered, bespectacled actor Wally Cox who portrayed Mr. Peepers on the popular American television comedy of the same name that ran from 1952-55. Some of Pepper’s oldest friends, such as Elvin Jones, preferred his birth name, “Park.”


Some Detroit musicians, however, didn’t care for Pepper’s playing. “When I got home from the army,” said Adams, “I discovered that what was mod and fashionable on baritone then was the very light, tender sound, and I had a number of people tell me quite seriously that if I ever expected to stay in music I would have to alter the way I was playing.” Several of these judgmental white musicians not only objected to Adams’ big sound, thinking it old-fashioned and too “black,” but they didn’t like his use of harmony, thinking that he didn’t know what he was doing. “He was so far in front of everybody,” said Hugh Lawson. “They mocked him because they didn’t understand it. That’s like Elvin Jones. They were so far in front.”
Three white players, however, did admire what Pepper was doing: Joe Vigiletti, the drummer Norman Purple, and the baritone saxophonist Frank Morelli. All three of them, according to Lawson, followed Pepper around from gig to gig. Morelli, who would much later take Curtis Fuller’s place in Yusef Lateef’s group, idolized Adams and wanted to study with him. Although Pepper was grateful for the admiration, as a “self-taught” player he somehow felt ill-equipped, despite his many accomplishments already, to teach the baritone saxophone to a younger devotee.

My co-author, John Vana, and I have at long last set up the contents of the entire Pepper Adams biography (see below). Again, our publication date is 2030, the centennial of Pepper's birth. The first half of the book is 100 pages in length, not including front matter. My last half of the book will be written in reverse chronological order. Chapter Four will cover the time when Adams was married, mostly after he left the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. Chapter Five will cover his thirteen-year period of time playing with Thad Jones. Chapter Six will deal with Pepper's arrival in New York until late 1964.
The formation of the Thad Jones-Pepper Adams Quintet, by the way, has been scaled back eight months, from March, 1965 to September, 1964. It turns out that the Quintet played gigs in New York City not soon after both Thad and Mel left the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band. This predates by two months Thad and Pepper's contribution to Oliver Nelson's legendary recording More Blues and the Abstract Truth. This new information will be reflected in changes that I will be making to my Adams chronology, posted at pepperadams.com.
As you can see by the headings below, Part Two of the forthcoming Adams book will give John Vana a chance to chart Pepper's growth as a soloist, discuss significant recordings throughout Pepper's thirty-year career, reveal his enduring legacy, and to get deeply into his important and extensive analysis of "The Big Three: Parker, Coltrane and Adams." I think that this section will be one of the most influential aspects of the book. Think of it: No one -- historians or fans -- puts Pepper Adams in their league. Yet he rightful belongs there, as Vana will explain through the use of numerous musical examples and carefully reasoned explication of what each has done in their playing career. All music examples will be posted at pepperadams.com.
As for the site itself, numerous upgrades have been made already to pepperadams.com. Please check it out.


CONTENTS


Dedication                                                                                 v
Contents                                                                                                vii
Foreword by ________________                                                         ix
Acknowledgements
Prologue

PART ONE
The Life of Pepper Adams

Ascent (1930-1955)
                        Chapter 1: What Is It?
                                          Interlude: Detroit Drives the Nation
                                          What Is It? (Part II)
                        Chapter 2: Inanout
                                          Interlude: A Brief History of Rochester, New York
                                          Inanout (Part II)
                        Chapter 3: Binary
                                          Interlude: Detroit Jazz, 1922-1954
                                          Binary (Part II)

Dominion (1956-1986)
Chapter 4: Now in Our Lives
                        Chapter 5: Conjuration
                        Chapter 6: Urban Dreams

PART TWO
The Music of Pepper Adams

Chapter 7: The Emergence of an Original Style
Chapter 8: The Big Three: Parker, Coltrane and Adams
Chapter 9: Key Recordings
Chapter 10: Jazz Innovator

Appendix
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Authors

Bird and Herbie

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.




I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and that you are anticipating a great Christmas season and new year. In the last few weeks one of my readers suggested that I open my Pepper Adams biography with the story of when Pepper heard Bird at Detroit's Mirror Ballroom in 1949. I end the opening section of Ch 1 with it, in a way building to it. He felt that, because it's about Bird, it would create far greater interest among readers than what I have now. Back to the drawing board, as they say.

I've been rereading the very fine biographical primer The Biographer's Art, written by Milton Lomask. One of the things he recommends is for an author to conceive of an ending well in advance, then work your way there as a destination. I'm toying with ending my biography with Pepper's appearance on the Grammy Awards telecast. It seems to me that the way the New York chapter of NARAS rallied behind Pepper when his appearance on the show was threatened with cancellation is a metaphor for much that occurred in New York when Adams got ill. Maybe I don't need to worry that much about the ending? The way the book is set up, the second section of the book (analysis) follows mine. Is it perhaps more appropriate to have John Vana's work summarize the entire book?

Over the last few weeks I also came across this great piece about Herbie Hancock: https://onmilwaukee.com/music/articles/herbie-hancock-curros-milwaukee.html#_
Hancock discusses how he joined the ByrdAdams Quintet. Here's his only mention of Pepper:

"In December of 1960, a couple of months after the Coleman Hawkins gig, I got a call from John Cort, the owner of the Birdhouse, a small club in a second-floor walkup on Dearborn Street, on the North Side. ‘Donald Byrd and Pepper Adams are playing in Milwaukee this weekend,’ he told me. ‘You want to play with them?’ "‘Are you kidding?’ I said. ‘Yeah, I want to play with them!’ I couldn’t believe it – I’d just been invited to gig with one of the best jazz trumpeters around. Donald Byrd was a veteran of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and he’d earned a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music. He’d performed with many of the jazz greats over the years, including John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and in 1958 he’d started a quintet with the baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams. That was the group I was being invited to play with."

This piece is the most in-depth one I've read about Hancock and his "discovery" by Donald Byrd. It turns out that John Cort deserves much of the credit for recommending Hancock to Byrd.


One thing that has always surprised me is how little Pepper Adams is mentioned by Hancock over the years. I know that Byrd is the one who met with Hancock's mother and assured her that young Herbie would be fine living with Byrd in New York once the band left Chicago. With that in mind, it seems likely that Pepper didn't have the same degree of responsibility for Hancock as Byrd. Still, you would think that Herbie would have absorbed some influences from Adams, perhaps his harmonic usage? It sure would be fascinating to know what kind of conversations the two of them had during the year that Herbie was in the Byrd-Adams Quintet.

Utah State Does It The Right Way

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

I arrived in Logan, Utah on a Monday, just before dinner. Logan is a college town, the home of Utah State University. The drive north from Salt Lake City is picturesque, especially breathtaking on Route 89 as you drive up and over the mountain pass about twenty minutes outside of Logan.

Baritone saxophonist Jon Gudmundson (http://music.usu.edu/faculty/faculty_directory/Gudmundson) invited me to Utah State. He runs their jazz program. The occasion of my two hour journey from Salt Lake City was to fulfill Jon’s vision of a Pepper Adams celebration at Utah State.

Several years ago in an email to me, Jon said he’d like to produce a big band concert of Pepper Adams charts to feature both his students and a guest soloist. Also, he thought I should participate in some way. Jon’s idea was an outgrowth of purchasing Tony Faulkner’s charts in 2013 as part of my Kickstarter campaign.

Fast forward to 2016. I wrote Jon to tell him that my daughter had moved to Salt Lake and I’d be in Utah at least once a year. That brought Jon’s idea for an Adams celebration back to the foreground. Moving ahead, Jon invited baritone saxophonist Jason Marshall (http://jazzbarisax.com/marshall.php, http://www.pmauriatmusic.com/us/artists/artist/14-jason-marshall ) to be the soloist with his two student big bands. And he asked me to lecture about Pepper Adams to his jazz history class and do a pre-concert interview about Adams with Utah deejay Steve Williams as a way of kicking off the show.

                    (Jon Gudmundson)

Apart from the Pepper Adams agenda, the week was made even more interesting by the presence of guitarist Peter Bernstein (http://peterbernsteinmusic.com/). Since Bernstein was passing through on his way back to New York, he too was invited to do a clinic and perform a concert at USU’s beautiful Performance Hall. This confluence of heavyweight New York musicians way out west felt like a Smoke reunion. (Both play there on a weekly basis.)

Sitting in on Peter’s concert were Jason Marshall and guitarist Corey Christiansen (http://music.usu.edu/faculty/faculty_directory/Christiansen ). The concert consisted of standards and it revealed a more introspective side of Bernstein’s artistry than I expected. His playing throughout showcased the harmonic inventiveness and technical range that has made him one of the world’s foremost guitarists.

The following morning I lectured on Pepper Adams in Jon’s class. It was comprised mostly on non-music majors. I only had 75 minutes. Much like my lecture at Brigham Young University the previous week I needed to keep my comments brief. Unlike BYU, however, I was able to read to the students part of my Prologue to my forthcoming Adams biography and interlace two YouTube videos for context: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCnWKm5uYhs and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfI6ljMgvuQ).

During my lecture, Jon Gudmundson said that he and Jason Marshall were talking about Pepper. Marshall questioned whether Adams on ballad performances ever stayed in a tender mood for an entire tune without double-timing. Partly on Marshall's behalf, Gudmundson asked me, “Does Pepper always scramble eggs?” “Yes,” I nodded. I mentioned that Adams in some ways was a frustrated soloist, spending too much time with big bands and not nearly enough recording or playing on his own with small groups. Jon, understanding my reply, said in summation, “He had a lot of notes inside that needed to come out.”

In addressing Jon and Jason’s question further, I then played for the class “Star-Crossed Lovers” from Adams’ great recording Encounter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie3hWHklEG0&list=PLEE675BC1DD76B95E) to show Adams’ interest in a more sublime, lyrical aesthetic. On that, unfortunately, Pepper only embellishes the melody. Much like Coltrane’s “Naima,” Pepper doesn’t take a solo, instead giving it to Tommy Flanagan as Trane did with McCoy Tyner. I thought to next play Pepper’s solo on “East of the Sun” with Toots Thielemans from Man Bites Harmonica but the class was coming to a close.

After the talk I thought more about the issue of Adams as an “extreme player.” Does that detract from what he does? Some musicians, such as bassist Major Holley, would ask him why he plays so many notes. Did they ask Art Tatum the same thing? Does that suggest a double standard? Is there a different aesthetic expected of piano soloists than saxophonists or low-pitched instrumentalists?

I remembered something Gary Smulyan once said to me about the audience perception of baritone playing, something he’s been trying to get away from as his career continues to evolve. He told me it’s always expected that he play aggressively. If he doesn’t, his fans are let down. Perhaps Pepper Adams felt the same pressure?

Basically, it seems to me that Pepper’s playing is characterized one way based on the bulk of his commercial recordings. Yet some of his little known audience tapes show an entirely different side to his playing. If Pepper, on commercial recordings, preferred a bravura, virtuosic style of playing, is that necessarily a bad thing?

I thought first about medium tempo Pepper solos, such as the audience recording “Bye, Bye Blackbird” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC2vilxFqpk ) where Adams strikes a perfect balance between behind-the-beat, swinging eighth-note choruses and double-timing. But then I remembered some commercial recordings. There’s this early Pepper solo on “A Winter’s Tale”: http://www.pepperadams.com/Compositions/compList/WintersTale/index.html#anchor

Pepper plays very lyrically until he doubles up at the end as a climactic denouement. How about his great solo on Excerent?: http://www.pepperadams.com/Compositions/compList/Excerent/index.html#anchor Do you have any lyrical Pepper solos you can recommend?

Back to Marshall and Gudmundson's point, how about Adams’ ballad playing in particular? Did Pepper ever hold back and not double-time? This ties into a criticism that Lewis Porter once articulated to me about Adams. He said, after listening to a Pepper solo at my house in the mid 1980s, that Adams is “an anxious player.” Do you in any way agree? Is he too quick to double up, too eager (= anxious) to slowly build up a solo? Do some of his lines, or his rhythmic patterns, add an anxious sensibility, especially when they’re staccato? Does Martin Williams’ comment to me many years ago about Pepper--“He’s playing Coleman Hawkins paradiddles”-- have any merit?

Lip scoops. Remember Brian Williams’ comment a year or so ago about Pepper’s overuse of them? Is this unique to Pepper? Is it part of his articulational concept?

Apart from all the time I spent thinking about the implications of Jon and Jason's observation, one of the highlights of my Logan experience was a jam session held at Jack’s Wood Fired Oven. Mostly an enthusiastic Tuesday night hang for Utah State music students and their retinue, the night was made particularly exciting thanks to the added presence of Jason Marshall, Peter Bernstein, various Utah State faculty, and especially Detroit trumpeter Kris Johnson (http://krisjohnsonmusic.com/), who drove up from Salt Lake with one of his bari students to see Marshall (his old Count Basie Band buddy). All took turns sitting in and Johnson was dazzling!

Equally enjoyable was my opportunity to speak to the large pre-concert audience on my final night in Logan. For thirty minutes I was asked a handful of questions by Steve Williams before an appreciative house prior to USU’s “Tribute to Pepper Adams.” At the Tribute (see program), Greg Wheeler conducted two Tony Faulkner charts: “Mary’s Blues” and “Trentino.” Later, Jon Gudmundson conducted three others: “Bossallegro,” “Doctor Deep” and “Etude Diabolique.” 

Featured soloist Jason Marshall played beautifully throughout the night. He had a chance to work with the USU faculty small group (Aggie Music Project) on two tunes between the big band sets, and added an absolutely exquisite surprise ballad duet, backed by piano. He prefaced it by saying (and I paraphrase), “I want to play something pretty. We need more pretty in our lives. It delays the oxidative process.”